Monday, December 4, 2017

After Fake News infraction, ABC's Brian Ross is no longer allowed to cover stories related to President Trump says ABC News President James Goldston who noted that it took the network over 7 hours to correct the mistake-CNN Money, 12/4/17

During ABC News' morning
editorial call Monday, audio of which was obtained by CNN, Goldston
excoriated his staff for the error.

"I don't think ever in my
career have I felt more rage and disappointment and frustration that I
felt through this weekend and through the last half of Friday," Goldston
said.

"I don't even know how many times we've talked about
this, how many times we have talked about the need to get it right," he
added.

"That how we have to be right and not first. About how in this
particular moment, with the stakes as high as these stakes are right
now, we cannot afford to get it wrong."

CNN provided the quotes
from the recording included in this article to an ABC News
spokesperson, who did not deny that they were authentic. The
spokesperson declined to comment beyond Goldston's remarks.

"250,000 tweets. One percent positive, 99 percent negative about this
news division. Two tweets from the president," he told staff.

Goldston also said, "If it isn't obvious to everyone in this news
division, we have taken a huge hit and we have made the job of every
single person in this news division harder as a result. It's much, much
harder. We have people in Washington who are going to bear the brunt of
this today and in the days forward. Very, very, very, very unfortunate.
Really, really angry about it."

The ABC News chief said that
Ross reported information that was "just plain wrong," and did so
without anyone "having ever made a decision that we were going to go to
air with that information."

"We just went on air with that
information," he said. "We hadn't approved doing that. And the thing
that just kills me about this is all we had to do was wait. We had to
wait a few minutes. A few minutes after that, the charging documents
came out. We know that those charging documents had come out, and we had
looked to those charging documents, and the charging documents didn't
match what we thought the story was. We would have not gone with that
story."

Goldston expressed additional frustration at the fact
that it took more than seven hours for ABC News to clarify the story on
ABC's "World News Tonight." Later, Friday evening, the network issued a
full blown correction in a written statement.

And then it took us seven hours, eight hours to get our
story straight. This is not acceptable. It's not acceptable. And we
will all pay the price for a long time."

Multiple ABC News
employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't
authorized to publicly discuss the issue, told CNN there is widespread
discussion about Ross' credibility moving forward.

"No one wants to work with him," said one ABC News employee.

"The future doesn't seem bright for him," added another. ABC News employees have also told CNN that there is great internal embarrassment over the blunder.

"It's a major embarrassment," one ABC News employee said.

"It makes me cringe," echoed another. "This is not what any networks
needs when people are so quick to say 'fake news' to you. It makes me
sick to my stomach."

Goldston himself also said during the call that Ross' credibility, and ABC News', had been damaged.

Goldston has been the president of ABC News for the past three and a
half years. A native of Britain, he was a producer at the BBC and
executive producer of ITV programs before joining ABC in 2004.

His anger on the morning call reflected a weekend's worth of criticism
of the news division, which is owned by The Walt Disney Company.

On Sunday's "Reliable Sources" on CNN, political analyst Jeff
Greenfield said ABC had made a very "consequential" error, especially
given the current political climate.

"This is exactly what
Trump and his allies want to say: 'No matter what you hear on mainstream
media, it's fake. They're doing it to hurt us.' And this is like
handing a sword to the people who want all media to be looked at in that
regard," Greenfield said.